Israeli demolition of Palestinian property
[11] Punitive house demolitions have been criticized by a Palestinian human rights organization as a form of collective punishment and thus a war crime under international law.
[12] Demolitions are carried out by the Israeli Army Combat Engineering Corps using armored bulldozers, usually Caterpillar D9, but also with excavators (for high multi-story buildings) and wheel loaders (for small houses with low risk) modified by the IDF.
The heavily armored IDF Caterpillar D9 is often used when there is a risk demolishing the building (such as when armed insurgents are barricaded inside or the structure is rigged with explosives and booby traps).
Amnesty International claims that Israeli authorities are in fact systematically denying building permit requests in Arab areas as a means of appropriating land.
[19] The practice of demolishing Palestinian houses began within two days of the conquest of the area in the Old City of Jerusalem known as the Moroccan Quarter, adjacent to the Western Wall.
A further 110 were shelled in the belief armed men were inside, and overall another 1,497 were razed for lacking Israeli building permits, leaving an estimated 10,000 children homeless.
[25] Between September 2000 and the end of 2004, of the 4,100 homes the IDF razed in the territories, 628, housing 3,983 people, were undertaken as punishment because a member of a family had been involved in the Second Intifada.
[35] In February 2005, the Ministry of Defense ordered an end to the demolition of houses for the purpose of punishing the families of suicide bombers unless there is "an extreme change in circumstances".
[38] As a punitive measure, one study by a Northwestern and Hebrew University group concluded that prompt demolitions brought about a lowering of suicide attacks for a month and that they are an effective deterrent against terrorism.
[10] Conversely, an internal IDF report of 2005, analyzing the effectiveness of the policy during the Second Intifada in which 3,000 civilian homes were demolished, found that terror attacks increased after house demolitions, only stimulated hatred of Israel, the damage caused outweighed any benefits, and recommended the practice be dropped.
[40][41] On 8 July 2021, Israeli army forces demolished a luxurious mansion in Turmus Ayya which was the family home of Sanaa Shalabi, who lived alone there with three of her seven children.
[43] At least 741 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem were made homeless between January and 30 September 2020 due to demolitions, according to data compiled by Israeli rights group B'tselem.
According to the Rebuilding Alliance, a California-based organization that opposes house demolitions, Haj Sami Sadek, the mayor of the village, has circulated an open letter asking for assistance.
][clarification needed] On 7 July 2021, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said Israel declared Humsa al-Bqai'a a "closed military area" and blocked access for international observers.
The NRC said that Israeli authorities must "immediately halt attempts to forcibly transfer around 70 Palestinians, including 35 children" following the Bedouin community's property being demolished for the seventh time since November 2020.
If, however,... potential suicide murderers... will refrain from killing out of fear that their mothers will become homeless, it would be immoral to leave the Palestinian mothers untouched in their homes while Israeli children die on their school buses.United Nations agencies and human rights groups such as Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross who oppose the house demolitions reject the IDF's claims, and document numerous instances where they argue the IDF's claims do not apply.
[1] They accuse the Israeli government and IDF of other motives: In 2004, Human Rights Watch published the report Razing Rafah: Mass Home Demolitions in the Gaza Strip.
[70][71] The report documented what it described as a "pattern of illegal demolitions" by the IDF in Rafah, a refugee camp and city at the southern end of the Gaza Strip on the border with Egypt where sixteen thousand people lost their homes after the Israeli government approved a plan to expand the de facto "buffer zone" in May 2004.
[71][72] The IDF's main stated rationales for the demolitions were responding to and preventing attacks on its forces and the suppression of weapons smuggling through tunnels from Egypt.
Human Rights Watch has argued that the practice violates international laws against collective punishment, the destruction of private property, and the use of force against civilians.
"[1] In October 1999, during the "Peace Process" and before the start of the Second Intifada, Amnesty International wrote that: "well over one third of the Palestinian population of East Jerusalem live under threat of having their house demolished.
Officials and spokespersons of the Israeli government have consistently maintained that the demolition of Palestinian houses is based on planning considerations and is carried out according to the law.
"[76]In May 2008, a UN agency said that thousands of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank risk being displaced as the Israeli authorities threaten to tear down their homes and in some cases entire communities.
"To date, more than 3,000 Palestinian-owned structures in the West Bank have pending demolition orders, which can be immediately executed without prior warning," the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a report.
"[78]In 2009, the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized the Israeli government's plans to demolish Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, calling the action a violation of international obligations.
[18][80] However, Klor later described the effect of punitive demolitions as "small, localized and diminish[ing] over time" and suggested that the real reason they were carried out was "to placate the Israeli public".
